Aoba Miyazaki, producer of My Hero One’s Justice, talks to the PlayStation Blog about the development of the manga-based arena fighter

“We will continue to work hard to deliver to users what they are looking for.”

The PlayStation Blog caught up with My Hero One’s Justice producer Aoba Miyazaki to check in on the development of the manga adaptation ahead of its upcoming October 26 release. The producer offered some insights into bringing the world and characters of My Hero Academia into the framework of an arena fighting game; how to best work each Hero and Villian’s Quirks into the gameplay is of course central to the game, and according to Miyazaki:

Bakugou, Shoto, and All Might, the characters with rather “straightforward” Quirks were easier to develop. But the characters with the trickier Quirks took a lot of trial and error.

Obviously we didn’t want the power of the Quirks to be the only factor that impacts the outcome of battle, so we tried balancing out the characters by specializing them with either long range or short range strategies. This helped us strike a good balance and, at the same time, reproduce the situations of battle which occur in the manga.

Miyazaki goes on to describe how more unusual Quirks were very challenging to implement in-game, citing shape-shifting Toga as an example:

The most challenging character was Toga. Toga is able to transform into the opponent, but we obviously didn’t want her to copy the opponent’s Quirk Attacks, as that would not be faithful to the original works.

But in a VS game, visually transforming wouldn’t be much of an added value. So what we did was think of how the sidekicks would react if there were two identical characters. That’s why Toga’s attacks while transformation is focused on using the “opponent’s sidekick”, assuming that they would be tricked on which side to be on.

He also discusses his personal favorite Hero, the importance of including the Villians’ story, and what Quirk from the cast he would personally choose for himself (hint: climate control!). Read the full interview here.